Sunday, October 18, 2009

Seeing as it's been five months since I last posted here, I'm going to guess there won't be a lot of folks who see this. Nonetheless, it's important to me to put one last post out there in the open before I call an official end to the House of Cheer.

When I started blogging in mid-2001, I was neither an early adopter nor a Johnny-come-lately. I'd been thinking about jumping into the blogosphere (the term that won out over the one I preferred, blogspace) for a year or so before I took the plunge. Once I did, I found it a fantastic outlet and an engaging hobby.

As is the case with most people who do this, my attention to the blog and interest in updating waxed and waned as time rolled on. I'd go through long patches of near-silence followed by stretches of furious posting, the latter prefaced with the usual "sorry for not posting" posts. But for all that, the HoC was part of the rhythms of my life and never far from my mind.

That stopped being true roughly a year ago. I realized I just wasn't feeling it anymore. In an effort to reverse that, I set a goal for myself at the beginning of 2009 to post a minimum of five times a week, with daily posting when possible. I held to that pretty well through mid-May. Then the wheels came off the wagon. They came off hard and fast. In fact, the wheels themselves are probably still rolling somewhere, leaving the wagon itself more or less permanently stalled.

I'm not going to say I'm done with blogging forever. If I feel the urge to bloviate publicly online again I'll be back, either here or with something like a WordPress or TypePad site. And I expect to repurpose this site at some point, but for now I'm just going to let it remain fallow for a while.

If I know you in real life and we're not already Facebook friends, link up with me there if you want to stay abreast of the happenings in my life. I expect I'll even have the occasional blog-like Wall post there.

That's it. Time to sign off. My deepest appreciation to all of you who have read my stuff here over the last eight years. It's been great.

Thursday, May 14, 2009

Real life is kicking me in the face, taking my lunch money, and making me sing while hoping on one foot at the moment. So until things calm down a bit in meatspace, I'm stepping away from this here blog. I'll probably be away for the next week or two.

If you know where to find me in my other online haunts, I'll be popping up there from time to time.

Monday, May 11, 2009

It's been a while since I paid close attention to how movies perform at the box office. Years ago I was pretty avid about following those numbers, and I got very good at estimating what any given film might gross during any given frame. But like visitor stats on this here site, it's just not something I keep tabs on anymore.

However, Thursday night I was having a conversation with a friend who'd just seen Star Trek and we got on the box office subject. Specifically, my friend wondered what Trek's debut might mean for Wolverine's numbers. Without hesitating, I said Wolverine would fall off by 70%.

I just checked the numbers. Wolverine did $27 million this weekend, after pulling $85 million its first weekend. That's a drop off of roughly 68.5%.